As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option is an information handling system. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements can vary between different applications, information handling systems can also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information can be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems can include a variety of hardware and software components that can be configured to process, store, and communicate information and can include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Energy efficiency, and in particular thermal management, are factors in server computing platforms. One trend that is contributing to closer thermal monitoring of components in server computing platforms is the adoption of “fresh air cooling” initiatives, which may use cool outdoor air to remove heat from computer equipment, where the ambient temperature may vary frequently and may vary outside the normal operating temperature range for IT equipment.
When designing the overall thermal control system the mass storage devices (for example, hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state disks (SSDs)) are unavoidable sources of heat (and have sensitivity to heat) that must be considered. In current implementations of such a control system, the storage controller is typically the agent performing the interrogation of the device for temperature information. The design is often a polling model whereby the storage controller requests current temperature information from the device on a regular pre-determined interval, storing the value for later use by the thermal management system.
Periodic polling of storage devices degrades system performance in three ways. Firstly, in many of today's enterprise-class HDDs and SSDs, requesting temperature information has two negative impacts. The drive's internal queue management of commands is impacted negatively. The request for temperature information causes the drive to process all outstanding commands and block processing of future commands while the temperature polling request is outstanding, thus negating the drive's algorithms for processing commands in the most optimal manner regardless of the submission order. Also, the latency in completing the temperature request—tens to hundreds of milliseconds—leads to corresponding I/O latency increase. Such delays are unacceptable in today's high performance I/O subsystems, especially when designed to occur on a regular interval, regardless of whether the drive's temperature has changed or not. The problem is multiplied for configurations with more than a single storage device. Secondly, the temperature polling model has an inherent delay within the thermal management feedback loop. The information provided into the control system is only as current as the previous completed poll. The control system must wait for the next poll to determine whether further corrective action is warranted. As system designers require more up-to-date temperature information, there is a requirement to decrease the interval between temperature polls. Polling more frequently reduces the impact of the feedback delay, but reduces system performance. Thirdly, storage controller performance is compromised by the necessity of constantly polling all attached storage devices for temperature (or other parameter) values.
The use of the same reference symbols in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.